Apple acquires 'Dark data' specialist AI Company Lattice Data

May 18, 2017

"AI is the defining technology of our generation," said Ernst Greg, the developer behind NVIDIA's training program and he was right on the money.

The AI rush is spreading through the tech industry and everybody wants a piece of the action. With Tech giants gearing up for the big push towards AI, apple has its own plans for the field that are in the making. Apple has bought AI startup Lattice Data, a company that specializes in 'dark data' or unstructured data, using its machine learning capabilities to structure such data so it can be analyzed.

Apple has acquired Lattice Data for $200 million according to a recent report. When Apple was called for a comment on the matter, they confirmed with their same old stale answer, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Lattice Data is built around the DeepDive system created in Stanford which used to extract valuable information from dark data. It was founded by Christopher Ré, Michael Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann and Feng Niu as the commercialization of DeepDive. Ré won the McArthur Genius Grant for his work on DeepDive, Cafarella who started out as the CEO, but is presently the CTO of lattice data is one of the co-creators of Hadoop.

Founded by a bunch of geniuses, the company stealthily raised more than $20 million funding from the likes of GV and Madrona before coming out of the shadows last year.

Most of the data generated today is unstructured, meaning they are in the form of images, videos and the likes and it is hard for the machine to read through such data. With the help of Lattice Data Apple will be able to enhance Siri's AI capabilities on a whole.